Saturday, May 31, 2014

Cotton warehouses at Apalachicola in the 1800s. Florida State Archives, Florida Memory Project

As I noted in an earlier post, the Confederate Navy never
really had a presence in Florida throughout the Civil War. There was some CSN
gunboat activity on the Apalachicola River in Florida, mainly in association
with protecting the important industrial center of Columbus, Georgia, upstream
on the Chattahoochee River. The main confederate warship operating on the river
was the steam sloop CSS Chattahoochee,
which was sunk by a boiler explosion in May 1863. Eventually, the CSN
raised the Chattahoochee and returned
her to Columbus for repair and refitting.

George W. Gift joined the U.S. Navy in 1847 as a
Midshipman. He resigned his commission a few years later (1851) to go into
business for himself in the California territory on the west coast of the
growing United States. When the war broke out, he traveled back to the south to
join the Confederate Navy. He was an energetic and ambitious officer who served
in multiple theatres, including on the Mississippi River, in North Carolina,
and in Florida. He even caught the attention of Adm. Franklin Buchanan, who
regarded him highly. He served as an officer on the Chattahoochee in 1863 under Lt. John J. Guthrie, left to serve in
North Carolina (where he was a participant in the CSN raid on the USS Underwriter), then returned to Florida
where he was given command of the refitted Chattahoochee.

During his first term of service on the Chattahoochee, he proposed to Lt.
Guthrie a plan to take a CSN raiding party downriver into Apalachicola Bay to
attempt to capture the Union gunboat USS Port
Royal. He never got the chance to do this, but now back in Florida, and
still flush with the success of the raid on the Underwriter, he determined to implement his earlier plan. On 3 May
1864 he set out from Georgia in the steamer Swan
with a force of Confederate sailors and some soldiers. The force assembled at
the Town of Apalachicola on 12 May. That night, they set out in boats to try to
capture the USS Adela; a fast,
sidewheel steamer that was itself a captured confederate blockade runner.
Unfortunately, on this night Lt. Gift’s luck ran out. As the CSN raiding party
set out from the docks, they were spotted by ship’s boats from the USS Somerset under the command of Acting
Volunteer Lt. W. Budd. Most of the CSN raiding party returned to land and
escaped through town. Gift and the men remaining with him were able to outrun
the USN boats in their launch and escape back upriver. Thus ended one of the
rare C.S. Navy military activities in Florida during the war.

CSS Florida. The CSS Chattahoochee looked similar to this. Naval History and Heritage Command.

Friday, May 23, 2014

One of the Confederate heroes of the war in Florida was
Capt. John Jackson Dickison. He was born in Virginia, but moved to Florida
prior to the war and established a plantation north of current-day Ocala. At
the start of the Civil War, he joined the Confederate military effort and
established two army units before finally assembling Company H of the Second
Florida Cavalry, C.S. He acquired a detailed knowledge of the back roads and
terrain of the Florida peninsula, which made him a constant threat to Union
military actions, and time and time again, he waged an audacious guerilla
campaign which constantly embarrassed and defeated the Union Army.

In April 1864, Union General George H. Gordon received
intelligence that his troops garrisoned in Volusia, Florida, might be besieged
by Confederate forces. He marshaled his resources and on 21 May 1864, he
departed Jacksonville with troops upriver on Army transports, accompanied by
the gunboat USS Ottawa (a “90-day”
gunboat) and the armed tugboat USS Columbine.
They arrived at Volusia, and found that the garrison there was not at all threatened.

Gen. Gordon departed northward by land with his forces to
return to Jacksonville, and had the navy flotilla accompanying him return by
river to the city. The Ottawa headed
downriver with the Army transports and left the Columbine at Volusia for another day or so to provide additional
fire support “just in case.” Capt. Dickison actually attacked the Ottawa and its transports while they
were at anchor off Picolata on 22 May 1864. He found out from intelligence
picked up by some sly southern ladies that the Columbine would be coming back downriver in the next couple days.

Dickison deployed two field guns and his sharpshooters in
the swamps on the banks of the St. Johns River near a location known as Horse
Landing. The afternoon of 23 May 1864, a smudge of coal smoke on the upriver
horizon indicated that the Columbine
was coming down.Surprisingly, her
commander, Acting Ensign Frank Sanborn, expected a possible ambush at Horse
Landing and had his guns fire a few shells into the adjacent swamps. Dickison
and his men took cover and re-manned their positions after the USN gunboat
ceased firing. As the tug passed by at a range of about 60 yards, Dickison’s
men opened fire. The first salvos were deadly, disabling the ship’s rudder,
killing most of the men in the pilothouse, and causing other damage. Although
Sanborn and his crew put up a gallant defense, many of the men on board were
African-american soldiers and feared for their lives, so they began to jump
overboard and try to make their way to shore. Sanborn surrendered the ship and
remaining crew to Dickison, who confiscated all of the weaponry and supplies he
could off of the ship, including its two Dahlgren boat howitzers. He then
burned and sank the ship due to fears that the Ottawa would be back upriver soon to provide defense/revenge.

This was the first known defeat/sinking of a
U.S. Navy vessel by a land based force. “Urban legend” has it that Confederate
Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest heard about this action and, determined to not let
some “Florida cracker” get all this glory, attacked and sunk a number of Union
vessels (both warships and transports) on the Mississippi. I’m not so sure
about this, myself. I think both Dickison and Forrest were “cut from the same
type of cloth” and conducted their actions independently. Any thoughts or
clarification from our devoted readers out there wouldbe welcome.

Dickison and his forces attacking the Columbine on the St. Johns River. Florida State Archives, Florida Memory Project.